“He won’t come across the stream because the banks are boggy and he would make a lot of noise. So he will come down the footpath from the north. He has soft turf under foot, and he is hidden from the alder all the way. So he has only to put his hand round the edge of that patch of thick stuff where the badger sett is in order to drop me out of my tree with absolute certainty at a range of five yards. If no one pays any attention to the shot —and why should they? —he has all night at his disposal to finish me off.

“But this is going to be the catch in it. You will work your way back into the brambles at B. It’s all dead stuff, and you can cut out a hole with a pair of garden clippers. Get your legs on soft earth down the badgers’ back door and pile their old bedding — there’s plenty of it about — underneath your body. You won’t be too uncomfortable.

“You will see him long before I do. In fact I shall never see him at all till we’ve got him. When he raises his revolver or automatic to fire, order him to drop it and put his hands up. He won’t. I am sure of that. So you’ll have to let him have it with a twelve-bore. I’m afraid he is bound to lose a hand or a foot at that range and I’m not too sure of my law. But I take it we are only using reasonable force when the intention to murder is plain.”

Ian refused to play without the presence of the police. Naturally enough. I had no reason — beyond my own need —to expect him to have preserved a wartime mentality.

“I’ll telephone the chief constable at once,” he said. “He’s a personal friend. At the shop with me.”

I replied that I had no objection provided the chief constable could, at such short notice, provide us with a policeman guaranteed to he fairly motionless for four hours and not even slap at a midge for the last two of them. What he would give us would be a detective who was very good indeed at sitting in a car or standing inconspicuously on a street corner.

“But he can trail the man,” Ian said, “now that you have predicted his movements.”

I ridiculed that. “‘Good evening, sir, I am a police officer and it is my duty to inquire your business.’ ‘I am enjoying the cool of the evening, officer.’ ‘Your name and address?’ ‘With great pleasure.’

“And he will give it,” I went on, “the correct address where he is staying and the false name he is staying under. But he can’t be detained. And he won’t be there in the morning. There’s not a thing the police can do until they have some evidence of a crime.”

“They can prevent it.”

“They can indeed. But tonight only. And two months later the detective responsible for me is bluffed by a gentleman of obvious respectability who pretends to be the Inspector of Inland Revenue or a Commissioner of Church Lands and calls at half a dozen houses before mine.”

“What about the description? Heavy build? Thick, black eyebrows?”

“He may not have them. I’m doubtful about the eyebrows already. As for the weight — don’t you remember Vasile Mavro and his pneumatic stomach?”

Ian smiled at last.

“It took Vasile weeks to learn to walk as if he were really carrying that stomach,” he said. “After all, this fellow hasn’t been trained by us.”

“Hasn’t he? If he was in Buchenwald or had friends who were, it’s very likely that he was trained by us or some organization nearly as good.”

“But then he can make rings round any county police!” Ian exclaimed.

“Round Special Branch, too —provided that his motive is perplexing, and that he is working alone, not for any political organization. Look at it this way! It was you who first brought up the tiger metaphor. Well, imagine he’s an experienced tiger with a taste for man! I gather that the difficulty is to make and keep contact. In fact it can’t be done without tying out a bait. That’s what I am. I have to be, because we don’t know any other which would tempt him. If you or the police refuse to let me hunt him in my own way I shall be killed in his.

“And here’s one other point! I’d like to talk to the tiger. Suppose I am the last on the list? The murders of Sporn and Dickfuss are nothing. I’d give him a medal for them. If I think he has finished, if I can convince him who and what I really was, I may not hand him over to the police at all.”

“You have forgotten the postman,” Ian protested.

“Punishing him is not going to bring the postman back to life. That could remain between the tiger and his God, so long as he doesn’t force us to send him to hospital.”

It was this argument —the weakest of all —which, I think, persuaded Ian. He had been wavering ever since I suggested the obvious truth that we were dealing with someone who had been a colleague or ally during the war.

“But you’re not going to sit on that nest or machan of yours if the tiger is examining it right now,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Thorns. Didn’t you say you had considered drawing-pins?”

I assured him that was only panic. No one except a pathologist could do much damage with a surface scratch. And anyway there were no thorns on an alder, so why arouse unnecessary suspicion by putting them there?

“What time do I get into position?”

“Let’s say he has finished going over the ground now or half an hour ago. Then he will want a meal, because he didn’t have any lunch. The sooner you are in position the better, but not later than six.”

The mention of meals at once brought out the regimental officer. Ian reproached himself for not realizing earlier that I had eaten nothing since lunch the day before—in fact I had had plenty, though in bits and pieces — and insisted on bringing back some food before he went to ground with the badgers.

Since I had to give way on the question of bringing in the police somewhere, we agreed that Ian should telephone his friend, using a vague and deprecating English manner, to the effect that it was just possible that he had come upon the trail of the parcel which blew up the postman, and that he should give a description of the suspect.

That was sound sense. If the dark gentleman, wounded or not, got away from us after showing his intention, it was a straight police job to hold him for inquiry until Ian could identify him. It was impossible to guess which way he would go, but, since his line of communication was across the Long Down, a patrol car on the far side of it had a chance of picking him up. Ian was also going to ask for police at the corner where the Stoke road entered Hernsholt. He thought he could manage all that on an old boy basis without giving too much away.

His farm was only some three miles off, so that he was back at half past five with a cold chicken and a bottle of wine. He had been able to arrange that two traffic patrols, in the course of their normal routine, should cover the roads leading away from the Long Down between nine and midnight and should keep an eye on parked cars. He could not get police to watch the Hernsholt end of the Stoke road as well and had detailed the invaluable Isaac Purvis for this duty —with strict orders not to interfere in any way with the big man in the brown suit and to telephone police immediately if he appeared to be hurt.

Ian was going to leave his car in Stoke and walk from there. His movements could be watched from the firs or the stream as far as the badger fortress but no farther. Once he had rounded that tangle of thorn and bramble he could hack his way into it. Rather belatedly I remembered that he was over fifty, and advised him to leave all violent action to me if there had to be any.

He replied that he was a hard-working farmer and far fitter than he had been at the end of the war; he guaranteed to carry me any time a hundred yards farther than I could carry him. No, his chief objection to the whole plan was that he had to walk across somebody else’s land carrying a gun and couldn’t think of any convincing excuse if he met the owner.